Patrick Pearse(1879–1916)

Patrick Henry Pearse was born at 27 Great Brunswick Street in Dublin (the street has carried the name Pearse Street since 1923) on the tenth of November 1879, eldest son of James Pearse, an English-born monumental sculptor of Birmingham who had built the leading ecclesiastical-sculpture business in Dublin, and Margaret Brady of Nobber in County Meath. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers' Westland Row School and at the Royal University of Ireland, where he took a BA in modern languages and Celtic studies in 1901 and a Doctor in Laws in 1905. He was called to the Irish bar in 1901, but the bar was the career he had taken to satisfy his father; the Irish language and the cause of Irish-medium education were his work from the first.

He joined the Gaelic League at sixteen, was elected to its Coiste Gnótha (executive committee) at twenty-one, and from March 1903 to August 1909 edited An Claidheamh Soluis, the weekly Gaelic League newspaper, from its Dublin office. He travelled annually to the Galway Gaeltacht (the Irish-speaking districts of west Connemara), built a small cottage on the Atlantic shore at Ros Muc as his summer house, and from there learned the Connacht Irish that became the linguistic centre of his prose and verse. His major early prose works in Irish, the short-story collections Íosagán and Other Stories (1907) and An Mháthair (1916), are central texts of the modern Irish-language literary revival.

On the eighth of September 1908 he opened Scoil Éanna (St Enda's School) at Cullenswood House in Ranelagh, Dublin, the first Irish-medium secondary school in the country, founded as a working demonstration of bilingual Catholic education in the heroic Cuchulain tradition. The school moved in 1910 to the Hermitage at Rathfarnham, the large Georgian house and grounds at the foot of the Dublin mountains where it operated for the next twenty-five years. The school was financially precarious throughout, kept open through Pearse's American lecture tours of 1914 and 1915, and operated on the bilingual and explicitly nationalist curriculum he had set out in his 1912 pamphlet The Murder Machine, the foundational critique of the Anglicising National School system of the period. Among the pupils at the Hermitage in those years were several of the men who would fight beside him in 1916, including his younger brother Willie.

He joined the Irish Volunteers at their founding on the twenty-fifth of November 1913 as the constitutional defensive response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912, was elected to the provisional committee, and after the September 1914 split between John Redmond's pro-war majority and the minority who refused to support the British war effort, he took the directorship of organisation of the breakaway Irish Volunteers under Eoin MacNeill. Through 1915 he was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and elected to its Supreme Council and to the small Military Council that planned the rising. His funeral oration over the grave of the Fenian O'Donovan Rossa at Glasnevin Cemetery on the first of August 1915 (the rulers of Ireland fools, fools, fools, they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves Ireland unfree shall never be at peace) is one of the central documents of the Irish republican tradition.

On Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, Pearse stood with James Connolly, Tom Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Éamonn Ceannt and Thomas MacDonagh as the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, signed at Liberty Hall and read aloud by Pearse from the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street. He was named President of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic and Commandant-General of the army of the Republic. The Rising held the centre of Dublin for six days against the British military response; the unconditional surrender was issued under Pearse's signature from 16 Moore Street on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1916, in the form he had written it: In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government have agreed to an unconditional surrender. He was tried by field general court martial at Richmond Barracks on the second of May, was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol on the morning of the third of May 1916 in his thirty-seventh year, and is buried in the quicklime grave at Arbour Hill Cemetery beside the other executed leaders. The Irish Republic he proclaimed from the GPO steps was constituted as the modern Republic of Ireland by the Act of 1948; the Pearse name is on the railway station of central Dublin, on the museum at the Hermitage at Rathfarnham, and on the central square of his summer cottage at Ros Muc. The reading of the Proclamation from the GPO portico is re-enacted in front of the General Post Office every Easter Sunday morning by the President of Ireland.